Roti Plain, Egg or Sweet

I've been visiting a local annual festival here in Phuket, and being in the South of Thailand, Roti is a staple of the food here. A roti is a cross between a pancake and flat bread, thin like a pancake but with a worked dough like a flat bread. When plain or with garlic it's good for dipping in curries, but it can be eaten sweet as a dessert or savory with egg and other fillings on a picnic.

I'm making three variations, plain, with egg and the sweet version. All done in the style of a roti chef I've met, who taught me the roti style they use down here in the south!

Preparation
1. Add the salt to the water and add the condensed milk.
2. Mix the margarine and flour, break up the margarine so it's well mixed into the flour.
3. Add the egg to the flour and mix that into the flour.
4. Make an indent in the middle of the flour and pour in the liquid.
5. Mix with your hands, you'll find this dough is sticky, you'll need to work it a lot.
6. Knead it for a good five minutes minimum, you need this dough to be tough enough to stretch out thin later. So it needs some work now.
7. Roll out into a sausage shape, and cut this into 16 pieces. (The easy way to split into 16 is to cut in half, then cut those into halves, then each of those into halves, to give you 2x2x2 = 16 pieces).
8. Get plenty of vegetable oil on your hands, roll each dough into a ball and place on an oiled tray.
9. Cover and leave for an hour. My roti chef leaves his overnight, but says an hour is enough, I made a curry while they were resting, which I'll be dipping these into.
10. An expert roti chef can throw these dough balls paper thin, but an amateur like me has to pull and spread them thin by hand. Cover your hands with oil so the dough doesn't stick.
11. Into an oiled pan, cook them till brown on each side and leave on kitchen paper to cool (and also to reduce some of the oil!). They don't take long to cook.

Preparation for Egg Variation
1. You can see the egg roti at the top of this article.
2. Blend one egg. One egg will do 3 or 4 roti.
3. During the frying of the roti, spread some of the egg mix onto the top of the roti, trying not to let it spill over the sides.
4. Fold up the edges to keep the egg in place, then flip it over to finish cooking the egg.

Preparation for Sweet Roti
1. The same sweetened condensed milk use in the roti is drizzled over the top of the cooked roti.
2. Cut it into squares. and eat it with a toothpick. That's the typical take away style sweet roti in Thailand.